Why Hiking Poles Are Important?

Hiking poles or sticks have very important benefits which a novice hiker would never understand. While most of the new hikers do not know how to use a hiking pole, there are countless benefits associated with them.

A study has shown how these poles spread our weight through our arms, thus our legs are under almost 15% less burden to carry us. Our arms become our legs and we can switch to an all-wheel drive instantly.

This increases our speed and weight distribution is also even. While many campers and hikers use two hiking poles together, you can also use one or not even one depending upon your requirements. But after reading these benefits of hiking poles, you might actually use one.

Brief benefits:

Hiking poles are nothing less than insurance policies for us. They offer a lot of safety in unknown terrain. Hiking would not happen on a symmetrical terrain, but the pattern would be treated asymmetrically where our feet might not adjust sometimes.

While hiking shoes are not slippery, there is a fair chance of slipping or twisting of feet. Hiking poles offer safety since we can use them and out all of our body weight on them during the time period when we can adjust our leg motion. There are also water streams which are fast enough to produce a jerk on our legs and feet of moving swiftly into them.

Safety:

Hiking poles prevent you from falling down, bad steps as well as sprains which would worsen your journey since the only cure for sprains is taking some rest, which is not viable in hiking. The best thing would be to avoid it which happens because of hiking.

Further, modern design poles distribute our weight evenly on all poles, this means that there is less pressure on feet with every step we take and there are little to none chances of any kind of ankle sprains or knee twists. Weight distribution is one of the other benefits of hiking poles.

Speed:

Speed is another factor. If you are hiking in an area where there can be rain anytime of the day, you would want to quickly go to the plains where you want to set up a camp. Using hiking poles lets you pace around at unrealistic speeds.

This allows you to use all four ground touching feet like structures to move around quickly as you go. Even if the terrain is a bit bumpy, your back will not sore and so would not your feet since the weight will be distributed.

The best part is that many times we need to find the optimal place to put our foot say we are in a creek and finding a stone to put our feet on because we do not want to wet ourselves. These poles also allow us that degree of freedom and motion.

Natural motion:

Natural position of body while hiking is a free motion. While hands are rendered useless during most of our trip, if we use poles, we are connected to the ground, hence we can freely move around now in natural motion.

Researches have also concluded that since our hands are in their natural position above heart while using hiking poles, there is a better blood circulation in our body while using these poles. It also keeps the body oxygenated so that even in areas of low air pressure, we do not go out of energy.

These poles also have their orthopaedic benefits as seen in many researches. Not only blood circulation is improved, but the heart beat rate goes down, which means that it has a positive impact on stamina.

Downfalls:

Using these poles has their benefits, but all things have their downfalls. Using hiking poles means that our hands are not free. It will mean that we do not have the added benefit of carrying something in hands, taking pics, even cleaning of our sweat.

These are some things which are important to do while hiking and we will solely be dependent upon others for these tasks. Further, out of many who take these poles, only some limited ones know how to use them.

Many hikers go for fancy poles comprising of the compass and other tools made out of fancy suspension and height elongation but they rarely know how to use this stuff. This results in lower productivity and can cause back pain if used for longer intervals.

Using hiking poles also depends upon the distance of the hike. If hike is of a lower distance say for a day, you do not need a hiking pole, but if it is of a longer distance, you must carry hiking poles with you.